Unpopular opinion, but the PG visit to Hathras feels like yet another visual depredation of an already plundered people.

Would people of that class/caste be celebrated for coming and condoling with the Gandhis?

This photograph in particular reads horrific for me.

Consider the elements :

- the focus is on Priyanka Gandhi
- the mother / sister here is a dispensable prop - there is no personhood attributed excepty for Grief Incarnate
- the setting is elided altogether

For starters a few questions we can ask as media:

1. If it was a condolence visit, as compared to a PR/political requirement, should we not have the brains to frame it as such?

2. Do we have a responsibility to prioritise stories ethically, or to follow a set narrative?

For example, in this priority - does a politician's performance of grief which obviously, overwhelmingly serve to enhance her public profile get more precedence than a mothers (sister's) grief?

In practice - who gets to be in a visual foreground?

This is gendered in a complicated way.

Do we want to keep feeding the ravening beast that wants the female in the public eye to be seen as nurturing, maternal - even if that politician is clearly using it to her benefit, at the expense of someone's wretched grief?

We obviously have bigger questions that we are embroiled in answering (for instance, what is fascism? Is it okay to be a little bit fascist, as a treat?) but these are symptomatic of the same problem, if in a more understated way.

The problem is: can media do its own thinking, or are we comfortable outsourcing these ethical dilemmas to political PR machinery?